Anne Palumbo: Timely answers to questions about cabin fever

Wednesday

Jan 28, 2009 at 12:01 AMJan 28, 2009 at 5:55 PM

As the nation’s leading expert on cabin fever and how it affects a marriage, I feel it is my duty to help couples cope with this cranky ailment, especially young couples who don’t know what they’re up against.

Anne Palumbo

As the nation’s leading expert on cabin fever and how it affects a marriage, I feel it is my duty to help couples cope with this cranky ailment, especially young couples who don’t know what they’re up against.

A third-leading cause of divorce – with the top being underwear infidelity and the second, picture-hanging tussles – cabin fever is a real problem with serious consequences that I, too, have struggled to manage.

It’s why I’ve offered to answer some tough questions about an ailment that threatens to unravel the fabric of our happy homes.

Q. What is cabin fever anyway?

A. Cabin fever is a condition marked by extreme irritability and restlessness from living in confined quarters with the same person from October to May. People who reside in the North are more susceptible to it than folks down South; and people who have been married for a long, long, long time are the most vulnerable of all.

Q. What makes you such an expert?

A. Two reasons: I live in the bone-chilling North, and I have been married to the same guy for 1,300 weeks, 2 days, 4 hours, and 15 minutes. Not that anyone’s counting … .

Q. How will I know if either of us is suffering from cabin fever?

A. Aside from wanting to poke your mate in the ear for no good reason, you’ll know the fever has struck if you zero in on things about your spouse that you normally don’t care about. I’m talking about niggling things like the way your spouse eats a pickle or the way your spouse’s nostrils flutter in a Nor’easter or even the way your spouse shuts the refrigerator door with his or her dirty foot.

Q. Do husbands and wives exhibit symptoms specific to their sex?

A. Oh, yes! Starting with men, they become obsessed with their wife’s routines. Obsessed! No matter what a wife is doing, these cabin-crazed husbands will want to know: who, what, when, where, why and will there be guacamole at the end of it. A typical conversation:

Husband: Where are you going?
Wife: To the bathroom.
Husband: Will you be gone long?
Wife: I don’t know.
Husband: Can I still count on guacamole?
Wife: Shoot me now.

A dead giveaway for women is how she handles the arrival of Sports Illustrated’s February swimsuit issue. Husbands should be on the lookout for a wife who camps out by the mailbox, snatches the loathsome magazine as soon as it arrives, and then dissects each page with a magnifying glass as big as Dolly Parton’s dinner plates. If her fever’s reached a boiling point, husbands can expect to hear — in a rather shrill voice — about every vein, stretch mark, and molecule of cellulite that the editors have clearly air-brushed away.

Q. Yikes! How do we survive bouts of cabin fever?

A. Husbands: Agree with the air-brushing. Wives: Learn how to make guacamole.

Q. Thanks for the survival tips. But what the heck is “underwear infidelity”?

A. It’s when a spouse holds on to and secretly wears old underwear that they’ve sworn they’ve tossed. A breach of this caliber is typically too great for a marriage to withstand.